Cleaning Your Water Supply

I don't know what you use as your water source for you and your animals - I did a quick Google Search and found nothing on giving livestock filtered water. In the words of Cypher in "The Matrix": "Nuh-thing."

Now, you can find lots of info on why you should drink filtered water in urban, suburban, and rural areas (especially when rural areas have animal-source E. coli in the groundwater). And a recent study in Alberta found that 70% of rural residents were drinking filtered water in the house.

In rural areas, the risk of the E. coli exposure is the greatest since most folks out here use shallow and deep wells for their water supply. We have been here 8 years (as of the end of the month) and haven't chlorinated the well since the home inspection (they did it for us for free, awesome guys).

Here's the general outline on what you are doing (please read the links carefully, I only paraphrase and your well setup will vary (especially note the chlorine needed for different size well casings, depth of water column, indoor water tank, etc).

Links:

• Chlorination of Drinking Water - from Cornell Coop Extension (good stuff starts on page 3)
• Disinfecting a Domestic Water Supply - from NMSU
• Shock Disinfection with Chlorination - from Wilkes University, nice table of non-bleach chlorine sources and dosage calculations.

1. Set aside time to do this - make sure you have water already set out for the livestock and humans for 12-24 hrs. Ahead of time!
2. Open well head and pour in bleach/water solution - you want lots of water to rinse the bleach down in so that you don't lose most of it to the walls (chlorine is wicked reactive and will start reacting with the walls (iron and chlorine hate each other). Rinsing gets the chlorine down where it should go.
3. Chlorinate the whole water system - here you are pushing the chlorine through the system until you get enough at the outlets. This includes the water heater, the indoor tank, toilets, and all faucets (indoor and outdoor). Basically you let them all run until you smell chlorine (mine took about 25 minutes to get a strong smell). Cornell suggests a cute trick - cut the chlorine needed by using a hose to drain some of the chlorine from outside faucets back into the well casing. You can't skip this because if there is bacteria in your well casing, it is also throughout your indoor pipes.
4. Re-chlorinate the well casing - with the same amount of bleach a second time. Let this stand for 12-24 hrs to give the chlorine outside and inside time to do its work.
5. Finally, drain the chlorine from the system - after the 12-24 hrs run a hose outside to drain some place special where a little chlorinated water won't hurt or erode too much. Can't run this down the drain to a septic tank! The chlorine will nuke your bacteria and slow decomp in the tank immediately.

It is important to do this more often than we did :D It certainly doesn't kill us to drink coliform bacteria - it may actually be important to maintain our diverse intestinal ecosystem.

But a yearly water test (we used a LaMotte E. coli test that was $13 at Ben Meadows) will go a long way towards making sure you chlorinate when you need to and minimize exposure to drinking coliform bacteria.